Director: Mira Nair
Starring: Naseeruddein Shah, Lillete Dubey, Shefali Shetty, Vijay Raaz, Tilotama Shome, Vasundhara Das

Beneath India’s schizophrenic collision of high technology and ancient tradition, and from its stuffy old-Raj sensibilities to the explosion of sound and colour that hits you in the face as you stumble between bars and bazaars, there can be few more intense, sensory places on earth. Although its film industry has a (deserved) reputation for turning out an endless supply of incomprehensible four-hour gangster musicals, a long and proud tradition outside of the Bollywood machine, from the masterful work in of Satyajit Ray throughout the second half of the last century to Deepa Mehta’s spectacular ‘Fire’ and ‘Earth’, suggests that India has the potential to be a sleeping giant of world cinema.

Mira Nair (‘Mississippi Masala’, ‘Salaam Bombay!’) has had an impeccable knack for creating films which cross over from India to the global market, while never compromising on their frank examinations of contemporary Indian culture. ‘Monsoon Wedding’ takes place in New Delhi, a city located firmly on the truly Indian cusp of old and new. Centred on the wedding of Aditi (Vasundhara Das) and Hemant (Parvin Dabas), it is an Altman-esque story which spirals around the sprawling family of Aditi’s father, Lalit Verma (Naseeruddin Shah). As a Punjabi family, weddings are by no means registry office affairs for the Vermas, and with four days left and guests arriving from all over the world, Lalit and his wedding planner P.K. Dubey (Vijay Raaz) are beginning to run out of time to get everything ready.

Weddings are hardly the most challenging of subject matters, and with the comedy focussing on the beguiling, marigold-eating Dubey, this could have been a subcontinental ‘Wedding Planner’ in lesser hands. But Nair is a director with a social conscience, and Aditi’s wedding is, in her eyes, a barometer for social change in India. Confronting issues of sexuality and, more seriously, a crumbling class system, Nair paints a loving, if critical, portrait of a country heading in too many directions at the same time. As the dialogue slips effortlessly between English and Hindi mid-sentence, people with little experience of Indian culture may have a hard time tuning in, but an impeccable subtitling job deals well with the constant language shifting and keeps things on track.

Shot mostly with hand-held cameras, Nair captures the vibrancy and colour of an Indian wedding, as the monsoon pounds, soaking everyone, and the song and dance carries on. ‘Monsoon Wedding’ feels warm, natural and immediate in its exploration of family values, but all is bound by Naseeruddin Shah’s wonderfully understated performance as a father trying to maintain his family’s dignity, and somehow hold all the chaos together.

Nair’s film is wickedly contemporary, continually hilarious and always delightful. Avoiding all the clichés of Indian cinema, and of those who attempt to describe the country but only end up describing how colourful the clothes are, the film does not care for catering to any particular audience, or fulfilling anybody’s expectations of what India should be — it is a film about the joy and the horror of family, and the kind of rapturous celebration that only a wedding in the pouring rain can bring about.